It's no secret that very few recreational distance runners are people of color. African-American runners know why that is–but what, if anything, should be done about it?

Between miles nine and 10 of the Little Rock Marathon, the course follows Center Street south through downtown and crosses Interstate 630, and as I kept the 3:35 pace group in sight this past spring, I couldn't help but reflect on the city–my hometown–that I'd been studying and writing about for four years. The previous fall, I'd published a book about race relations here, a half century after the notorious integration conflict at Central High School, and one chapter had been devoted to the effect of I-630 as a physical and psychological barrier between the races. Now, on this overpass, I thought about how the marathon route, as it crossed and recrossed the interstate four times over the first half, seemed to stitch the city together, taking many of Little Rock's white citizens into neighborhoods they wouldn't ordinarily visit. We passed construction sites on the campus of Arkansas Baptist College, a historically black institution that was being revived under the guidance of Dr. Fitz Hill. We climbed the slight but steady incline of 16th Street, which in the 2010 census was 90 percent black, and turned right in front of the magnificent facade of Central High, the civil-rights era icon stretching for two full city blocks. On the pavement where I now ran, nine African-American students in 1957 had made a stand against a virulent mob, an event that inspired my own steps.

But on this Sunday morning, the school's graceful grounds stood silent, the blocks surrounding it almost empty of spectators. Around me, my fellow runners, some 1,800 of whom would finish, almost all looked like me: white. A half hour ahead of me, two Kenyans now living in North America, eventual men's winner Mark Chepses and second-place finisher Julius Kosgei, had passed the school step for step, but where were the African-American runners who might be inspired by the history of the school? In fact, I saw no black runners on the course until I pulled beside a couple running together about halfway through. Across the U.S., that scene is replicated in distance races from 5-Ks to marathons every weekend: African runners, male and female, take home the prize money, but back in the pack, runners of color, especially African-American runners, are scarce.

That perception has become a truism, and the truism has become a joke. The popular satirical blog "Stuff White People Like," which spawned a best-selling book, ranked marathons 27th on the original list, just behind farmer's markets and Wes Anderson movies. More scathing was comedian Daniel Tosh, in a segment on his show, Tosh.0: "The only reason marathons are still around is so 20,000 white people can chase three black guys through the streets of Boston like the good old days."

Is the joke too easy? How valid is the idea that distance running is a predominantly white sport? Well, pretty darn valid, according to Running USA's recently released biannual National Runner Survey. Media spokesperson Ryan Lamppa stresses that its methodology is "opt-in" from 60 running organizations and clubs nationwide and "may not be a representative sample" of the actual running population. Still, the numbers, compiled between January and May 2011 from nearly 12,000 respondents, are eye-opening: "Core runners" (who tend to enter running events and train year-round) are 90 percent Caucasian, 5.1 percent Hispanic, 3.9 percent Asian/Pacific Islander, and, in perhaps the most startling figure, only 1.6 percent African-American. (The sample adds up to more than 100 percent because respondents could mark more than one choice.) Those numbers are consistent with ones from other surveys, such as Runner's World's, and have remained low even as the number of runners has grown by 56 percent in the past decade, according to the National Sporting Goods Association. (The overall population, from the 2010 U.S. census, is 72 percent white, 16 percent Hispanic or Latino, 13 percent black or African-American, 5 percent Asian, and 1 percent American Indian or Alaska native.)

Jean Knaack, executive director of the Road Runners Club of America, deemed a more scientific survey unnecessary. "Everybody knows," she says about low participation rates by minorities. "Everybody is aware that distance running, from the early days, was prominently white and has continued to be that way."

The most obvious question to ask next is, Why? The economic barriers to entry for a potential runner, who needs only a pair of shoes and a stretch of pavement, are much lower than activities requiring dedicated equipment or real estate like golf or tennis or cycling. Track and field has traditionally been welcoming to African-American athletes, providing enduring historical heroes like Rafer Johnson, Wilma Rudolph, and Jesse Owens and more contemporary role models like Michael Johnson and Florence Griffith Joyner (though mostly in the sprints and jumps, about which more later). And many top athletes in distance running today are people of color–including Americans like Bernard Lagat and Meb Keflezighi.

The topic of race and distance running can be a sensitive one, for sure. In the forums of various running Web sites, it pops up in subject headings every few months, and the posts provide proof that those most deeply and emotionally invested in the sport, whether thoughtful commenters or trolls, approach the discussion with curiosity and strong opinions. From the freewheeling (and sometimes dispiriting) responses on letsrun.com to the more measured (and moderated) ones of runnersworld.com, the search for information is ardent, and the most basic questions recur. What does account for the low participation numbers among minorities, particularly among African-Americans? What obstacles do minority groups face, whether as longtime, new, or would-be runners? And finally, what can or should be done to address this lack of diversity?

To attempt to answer these questions, over the course of some three months I spoke with elite and recreational distance runners, heads of national organizations, race directors, members of running clubs, running stores, coaches, and others. What emerged was a picture of ingrained stereotypes (of both black and white runners), institutional complacency, and cultural resistance, but along with that a firm testament to the joys and satisfaction of running and a strong (if sometimes naive) faith in the power and transcendence of the sport.
Few Role Models, Unsafe Streets

Tes Sobomehin, 34, has the lithe grace and statuesque build of a longtime athlete, and indeed, for much of her life she has been an accomplished basketball player and coach. Now a personal trainer and a professor of health and physical education in Atlanta, she has only recently taken up running. "A year ago," Sobomehin says, when I met with her and five other members of the city's chapter of Black Girls RUN!, a national organization of African-American women runners, "I would have been the one to say there's no need to run more than a mile unless you have to." For Sobomehin, a major reason for that is simply that she seldom saw any other people like herself running for exercise. "Not having a lot of role models is a big deal," she says, a sentiment echoed by almost every black runner I spoke with.

From the vantage point of the front porch in white neighborhoods, residents who embark on a morning or afternoon run are commonplace. But in predominantly black areas, such a sight can be rare. As Kevin Lyons, a black journalist based in Austin, Texas, and avid runner who has written about the paucity of African-American runners on his blog, "5ksandcabernets," sums it up: "You do what your neighbors do."

The cofounders of BGR!, Ashley Hicks and Toni Carey, who met as students at Middle Tennessee State University, faced the stereotype from Carey's own mother. After college, Carey, who was living in New Jersey at the time, had gained some weight and decided to start running. When she called her mother to tell her, the reply was, according to Carey, "'Well, black people don't run.' I was like, 'What?' I was a bit discouraged, so I called Ashley, and we were like, 'Black girls do run!' And that's how it got started." BGR! began life as a blog where Hicks and Carey would simply document their trials and progress in the sport. It has now expanded into a national advocacy and networking organization for black women runners with chapters in 40 cities, more than 7,000 Facebook "likes," and nearly 3,000 followers on Twitter. A virtual forum for members, the site also sells merchandise, reviews products, travels to races, and fund-raises for nonprofits like Girls on the Run, a program to help girls build self-esteem through running. The Atlanta contingent, the largest in the network, had attracted 2,800 members as of September.

Though now a runner, Sobomehin is familiar with another reason for the sport's failure to attract African-Americans. She grew up in tough, urban Gary, Indiana, and jokes about her youth, "In our neighborhood, if you saw somebody running, you were going to join them, and it wasn't for exercise." Though a result of socioeconomic conditions more than race or ethnicity, the perception of danger in minority neighborhoods is frequently cited as another deterrent to running.

In fact, "Lacking a safe place to exercise" was the top barrier to physical activity for African-American women age 40 and older in a 2000 study published in the journal Health Psychology. In another study for the American College of Sports Medicine in 2007, Simon J. Marshall, Ph.D., the lead researcher, commented, "People in poverty are more likely to live in neighborhoods where public recreation is unavailable or dangerous," but he added, "this does not mean that culture does not play a role."
Football, Not Cross-Country

The common social currency for Sobomehin in Gary was basketball, and the extent to which it and football eclipse other sports (including, now, even baseball) in the black community cannot be overestimated. The skinny second-string high school wide receiver rattling around in his pads who easily completes end-of-practice bleacher runs rarely entertains the idea of going out for the cross-country team. "There's social pressure to play football and basketball," says Martin Beatty, an African-American who has been the head track and field coach at Middlebury College in Vermont for 24 years. Shawn Fenty, who co-owns the Fleet Feet Sports store in Washington, D.C. (and whose brother is former Washington, D.C., mayor Adrian Fenty), concurs: "Within African-American culture, if your kids don't play football and basketball, in a lot of communities, it's not respected."

That dozens of black Americans have become stars in sprinting events at the elite level perpetuates the durable stereotype that African-American runners, female and male, may run fast but they don't run far. As early as the 1920s, activists fought the notion that African-American track athletes were better suited to sprints than distance events or lacked the discipline to pursue the latter. In 1927, Edwin Bancroft Henderson, a mixed-race writer from Washington, D.C., who has been called the "father of black sports history," asserted that one reason "our boys have not been distance champions" is that white coaches lacked the "time and patience" to develop distance runners among black athletes who showed promise. Beatty, the Middlebury coach, says that when he was growing up in New Haven, Connecticut, in the 1960s and '70s, "the thought never crossed my mind to run distance. I never knew anything more than the 400; it was never made available to me. It's kind of sad. You still see it today. You don't see many African-American kids running cross-country or running the 800 and 1500, it's all the shorter stuff and jumping." Iilonga Thandiwe, a member of Atlanta's South Fulton Running Partners, believed to be the oldest black running club in the country, adds: "The reality is that obviously there has been segregation by discipline in track and field. Whether that's self-segregated or cultural, I think we have internalized some of those stereotypes. If, in fact, the distance is longer than 400 meters, that's something the white folks do."

One glaring irony is that the man who laid the foundation for the emergence and growth of modern distance running, Ted Corbitt, was a black American, the grandson of slaves. Corbitt, who died in 2007, was an unassuming man who didn't court the spotlight, but Bill Rodgers has called him the "grandfather of our sport." He competed in the 1952 Olympic Marathon, helped found the Road Runners Club of America (RRCA), assisted in designing the first New York City Marathon course in 1970 (then finished fifth at age 51), and held U.S. records in the 25-, 40-, and 50-mile runs. He was inducted into the inaugural class of the Distance Running Hall of Fame in 1998. Thandiwe, a keen student of the political and racial dimensions of running, faults national groups like the RRCA for not making more of an effort to promote minority figures like Corbitt. "Where on the RRCA's Web site do I find out about this black person who excelled in distance running?" he asked. "He's all but missing from the RRCA's own history. I think that's a problem."

Sometimes, elite African-American distance runners have come to the sport almost by accident. Richard Cooper grew up in Lindale, Texas, near Tyler, hard-core football country. Cooper's primary sport was basketball, but early on, he had some success in the mile; by eighth grade he had run 4:51 and soon added cross-country in the fall. When he ran a 9:18 two-mile at the Texas Relays in his senior year, he attracted the attention of University of Arkansas's famed track coach John McDonnell and walked on the team the next year. Cooper eventually earned a scholarship and ran cross-country and track, winning the Southwest Conference title in the 3000-meter steeplechase three times (1987–89) and in the 10,000 meters his senior year (1989) before pursuing a pro career. As an African-American distance runner, however, he was a lonely man. "Every time I toed the line in high school," he says, "I was the only black guy in the race. Every time I toed the line in college, I was the only black American in the race. There were Kenyans–everybody thought I was one. John gave me the nickname 'Kenyan Coop.'" Two decades later, not much has changed for elites. African-American middle-distance runners Steve Holman and David Krummenacker were among the country's top performers in the 800 and 1500 meters from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s, but since then, no American-born minority distance runner has emerged on the world stage.

"American-born" can be, of course, an odious distinction to make in our melting pot, but the dominance of African runners (even African, now American runners) seems to further discourage American minority groups from being able to identify with the sport. When she was coaching basketball at Augusta State in Georgia, Sobomehin helped out at cross-country meets and found that even among HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities), the team members were "almost always African," she says. "That's crazy." And in fact, the accepted perception that a black distance runner must be African has created a form of xenophobia about the sport, where naturalized citizens like Lagat and Keflezighi are sometimes labeled "carpetbaggers" and the New York Times reported that there were "thirty-three foreign-born athletes," including all three qualifiers in the 1500 meters, competing for the United States in Beijing. Keflezighi suffered questions after his 2009 New York City Marathon win about how "American" he really was (especially in online discussion boards), though he came to this country when he was 12 from war-torn Eritrea and did all of his training in the United States. Ryan Hall, one of the country's top marathoners (and who is white), considers those questions nonsense: "If someone is a U.S. citizen, I see them as every bit as American as me." Kevin Lyons, the Austin blogger, greatly admires Keflezighi, but nevertheless believes that to build diversity, distance running needs an elite competitor who is also "a regular black guy who says this is cool." Lyons admits that he rarely watched golf until Tiger Woods started playing and winning.

What about the massive media coverage given to celebrity marathoners like Oprah Winfrey and Sean "P. Diddy" Combs? To hear black runners tell it, those efforts have done some good by raising money for charity but little to bring African-Americans to the sport. "The marathon is so out there," says Fenty, the Washington store owner. "It's more powerful if they say, 'Run a 5-K,' or 'Find something you like to do and do it for half an hour or 45 minutes every day.' People pick these huge goals, and once they reach the goal, they're usually kind of beat up and burned out." Brenda Stallings, who leads the Black Girls RUN! Little Rock chapter, closely followed Combs's training for the New York City Marathon in 2003 and found it admirable that he finished but was less impressed with the follow-up of celebrity marathon dilettantes: "It would be more inspiring if he were still running. Oprah did hers and that was the end of it."
A Small Community That Cares…

On a steamy Saturday morning in May in Atlanta, the South Fulton Running Partners (SFRP) gather at the house of a member, as they have every Saturday since they formed more than 30 years ago, for their weekly "fellowship" run. The Partners have counted among their members politicians, doctors, mechanics, ministers, accountants, truck drivers, and architects. Despite a few knee braces, the group that mingles in the driveway of the host is impressively hale; almost everyone is north of 40 with strong muscle definition. Routes of three different lengths are passed out, the longest a six-miler that winds through the Cascade and Peyton Forest neighborhoods in Southwest Atlanta, taking in the paved Lionel Hampton Greenway Trail, through a bucolic forest of loblolly pines and mature hardwoods.

In 1962, the neighborhood, which was then a solidly middle-class enclave of white families in brick ranch houses, became a site of civil rights protests as the city erected barricades separating it from neighboring black communities. Courts soon ruled the barriers illegal, but within a year, historian Kevin M. Kruse writes in his book White Flight, "all but fifteen white families had sold their homes to black buyers and abandoned the neighborhood." Today the area remains solidly African-American (92 percent according to the 2010 census), but as the Partners set out on their run, they pass few neighbors who are independently out to do the same. In avidly pursuing–and loving–a sport that so few of their racial peers practice, the Partners have often felt separated from both their own community and from the larger (white) body of runners in general.

Jim Lemon cofounded the group in 1979 with a friend, the late Jerry McClain. At first they simply walked around a school track for stress relief. Walking became a "trot," and they soon left the track for the streets of Southwest Atlanta, training modestly after deciding to enter a popular local 5-K. On race day, "there were about a thousand runners," remembers Lemon, "and only about five blacks. In Atlanta! We were amazed." Eventually, they encountered other black runners on the high school track or at races, like the Peachtree Road Race, and fashioned a formal organization with the goals of promoting "running as a means of achieving and maintaining good physical and mental health, fellowship, and camaraderie" and of striving for "social welfare, civic betterment, and community improvement."

The club capped membership at around 35, a small enough group to ensure that intimacy would be retained. After that morning run in May of this year–with some good-natured complaints that the six-mile run actually measured more than seven miles–the Partners assembled in the backyard of the host, whose mother had recently died, and conducted an informal memorial ceremony. They joined hands in a circle for a prayer and then planted a small Japanese maple in her honor. The run and the ceremony were followed by a feast both healthy (quartered oranges) and down-home (fried catfish and grits).

Despite the contradictory nature of the two courses of the postrun meal (or perhaps because of it), the Partners understand that African-Americans often have specific challenges to starting and maintaining exercise and that the stakes are high–not just for their population but for the country's health. Running can be an effective tool in reducing the stunningly higher incidence of obesity and diabetes in minority populations. According to a 2006–2008 study by the Centers for Disease Control, blacks in the United States had a 51 percent higher prevalence of obesity and Hispanics a 21 percent higher prevalence, compared with whites. As for diabetes, these groups fare even worse: Compared with non-Hispanic white adults, the risk was 77 percent higher among non-Hispanic blacks, 66 percent higher among Hispanics, and 18 percent higher among Asian-Americans.

David R. Williams, a Harvard University professor (and two-time Detroit Marathon finisher) who studies racial differences in health, told Steve Barnes on an Arkansas public-affairs television broadcast, "You cannot take individuals who have been shackled by chains and put them at the start of a line to run a marathon…and expect them, if they haven't had any training or preparation, to be successful." He was speaking metaphorically, but a very real fact he cited is that "96,000 African-Americans die every year prematurely from racial disparities in health." The benefit of narrowing the health gap, he asserted, is economic as well as moral–the difference costs the U.S. $308 billion annually. "All of our institutions," he said, citing schools, churches, and others, "need to be encouraging healthy choices."
…And A Big One Just Starting To

According to the group of Partners who talked with me after that Saturday run, they've never received much help from the distance-running community at large in encouraging minority involvement. J.T. Franks, a former president of the Partners, says that before the SFRP, along with the Atlanta Track Club, initiated their participation with the Road Runners Club of America in 1996, there were no African-American clubs in the group.

"If there's no effort ever made for them to be welcomed into the organization," Franks says, "we've got to push the door open to get in." Bob Holmes, a former Georgia state legislator and another longtime Partner, served on the board of the RRCA for four years and adds, "There were no resources used to make that special effort to recruit."

Jean Knaack, who took the reins of the RRCA in 2005 after a period of turmoil and financial crisis, says her organization is "focused on rebuilding." Increasing diversity "might not be in our top three" priorities, but she hopes it will be a side effect of the RRCA's push for partnerships–like a recent walk-run event with Weight Watchers–that reach "beyond the running community."

One strategy of the New York Road Runners to create more diversity in the sport, according to the group's president and CEO, Mary Wittenberg, is to encourage young runners through programs in the New York City public schools. Of the 50,000 to 60,000 children participating, she says, 32 percent are African-American and 49 percent are Hispanic. Making the 2010s the "decade of youth running," she adds, "we'll end up with a much more diverse population of runners 10 years from now." Other initiatives, like Students Run Oakland and Students Run Philly Style, mentor at-risk children and help build self-esteem through training for races.

Still, many black runners believe that the established running community, as generous and welcoming as it can be, has not engaged in serious outreach to underrepresented ethnic and racial groups. "I can say that [running institutions] have not done enough," says Charlotte Simmons, a cofounder of the National Black Marathoners Association (NBMA), which has more than 2,000 members in 43 states. One response to that has been for minorities to form their own organizations. "People say, 'There you go separating yourselves again.' But we're not separating ourselves, we're embracing. We got a lot of flak for our title, but we want you as a black runner to know that if you want to come to a race and socialize, we will be there.

"Our goals are to bring visibility to distance running and work toward eliminating obesity and its related illnesses in the African-American community. And when we reach out to races, we don't ask for a lot: a booth for visibility and a discount code, that's about it. A few races have turned us down. Why did we choose [the Deadwood Mickelson Trail Marathon in] South Dakota for one of our trips? Because this guy wanted to expose African-American running there."

"This guy" is Jerry Dunn, the founder of Lean Horse Productions and the director of four races in South Dakota, who said he reached out to the NBMA for both "humanitarian and marketing" purposes. He knew he would get some press, he had black roommates in college and the military, and "my dad was a super-racist," so it was a way to separate himself from that legacy. He doesn't think that race directors who turned down the NBMA are necessarily prejudicial, but if their races are filling up anyway, they might ask themselves, "Why bother?"

The Little Rock Marathon may wind through diverse neighborhoods and past civil-rights landmarks, but co–race director Geneva Hampton, who is herself of American-Indian ancestry, says they haven't made any special attempt to recruit minority participants to the event. "We haven't tried to target any population," she said in an interview at her office in the basement of Little Rock City Hall (the race is organized by the city's Parks & Recreation department). "Color's not one thing we really look at. What I love about marathoning is the road doesn't care what color you are." Hampton also says that the designers of the Little Rock course didn't try to route the race through specific neighborhoods but simply "picked the flattest route we could find" that "showcases the city well." But Tony Reed, the other cofounder of the NBMA, believes considering diverse areas for race routes helps with visibility, and his organization encourages it. In St. Louis, Reed's hometown, "the marathon course ran through one of the projects," he says, and some kids there, identifying with someone who looked like them, "ran a block with me."

A further complaint among African-American runners is that the average recreational runner of color is "invisible," unrepresented in media, including TV coverage, magazines, and advertising. One repeated charge involves Runner's World itself. "You flip through the magazine, and you just don't see yourself," says Adrienne White, who is a member of Atlanta's Black Girls RUN! chapter. Stallings, of Little Rock's BGR! (so devoted to the sport she volunteered at a water stop for the Paris Marathon during a recent vacation there), extended that thought: "If we don't see us, we don't think that's really for us. I read the magazine because it's insightful, but I'm not going to look down there and see me. " (Although even in this issue, advertising is getting more diverse.)

Knaack believes shoe companies and other running industry businesses are neglecting a potential market by publishing and broadcasting ads in which "for the most part you always see white guys or gals. You almost never see Hispanics or Asians." She says she told one shoe company representative at a marathon party that many minority runners are new to the sport and over age 45, so they "are completely untapped, non– brand loyal, high-income earners that you guys aren't interested in advertising to." Adds Charlotte Simmons, of the NBMA: "Embracing the African-American community, what are you gaining? A lot of talent. A lot of resources. We travel to races; we spend our money. It's a win-win for everyone to embrace the African-American distance-running community, the Hispanic community."

A former elite distance runner, one-time head of women's track and field promotions for Nike, and now head track coach at Lincoln High in Portland, Oregon, Charlotte Lettis Richardson (who is white) documented the struggles of women to gain acceptance in distance running in her film Run Like a Girl, and sees parallels in the running industry's attitude toward minorities. She says Nike was ahead of the curve in supporting her and other women, but for many shoe and apparel companies, the relatively low numbers of minority distance runners discourages outreach: "There's a certain amount of laziness, and until they see a groundswell of something, they don't go after it. If they want to grow their business, they should be looking for new opportunities."
Finally, Hair and Fear

One of the major issues for African-American women that might never occur to white runners is one that film directors Spike Lee and Chris Rock have explored in their work: hair. "It sounds silly," says Carey, whose mother owns a cosmetology school, "but that's one of the biggest obstacles we hear." In fact, upkeep of hair is a constant source of anxiety and planning among African-American women who run, especially if they use the common chemical processes for straightening and perming, which "sweats out" in the course of exercising. The U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Regina M. Benjamin, even weighed in on the topic in August, telling the New York Times, "When you're starting to exercise, you look for reasons not to, and sometimes the hair is one of those reasons."

"When I started running," says Brenda Stallings, of the BGR! chapter in Little Rock, "I had permed hair. It's almost impossible to run in the morning and then blow-dry your hair, straighten your hair, curl, and get to work on time, especially if you have children." She now wears her hair in dreads. Cost is also an issue among women who go to a salon every week, says Miya Smith, of BGR! in Atlanta, who has been running since 2004 and has adjusted her beauty parlor visits to best fit with her training. "After you've sat in a salon for three or four hours and spent money, the last thing you want to do is go running and sweat it out." For other women, adopting a "natural" hairstyle is a solution and is becoming more acceptable, but as Sonya Jefferson, another BGR! member in Atlanta, points out, "A lot of people don't want to go natural if they have certain corporate jobs; they feel like they're not promotable. Hair is the number-one challenge."

Members of Black Girls RUN! can find camaraderie in tackling practical concerns like hair care, but the greater benefit of joining such a group is psychological. "Looking at our Facebook page," says Tes Sobomehin, of Atlanta's chapter, "the common thing we see again and again is fear of the unknown."

The six women of Atlanta's Black Girls RUN! group who met over coffee to speak with me represented a range of athletic ability, age, and interests. There were former high-level basketball players like Sobomehin, who coached at Augusta State, and Adrianna Nebedum, who played at Spelman College. There was Michelle Black, a gym regular who only started running in February 2010 and within a year had completed one full marathon and 17 halfs ("That's nuts!" another woman said); and Sonya Jefferson, a former high school sprinter who has been running distance for a decade but is attempting her first marathon next year. Miya Smith took up running "to keep in shape after you leave college and get into the sedentary lifestyle of work." Adrienne White "hated running" but, after a five-day hospital stay that threatened to turn more serious, made a promise to herself to do the Peachtree Road Race before she turned 30, and now running is "an essential part of my sanity and health routine!" as she wrote on a BGR! blog post. For Carey herself, starting Black Girls RUN! "was the first time that I would call myself being athletic in any way. I'm not competitive; that's not what drives me."

All found in running something that fit their goals and needs, as diverse as those are. That's something the 90 percent of "core runners" who are Caucasian, according to those Running USA figures, have known was there in the sport for a long time. "There are probably a lot of people who want to run but don't know where to begin," says Miya Smith. "One of the runs I went to, I ended up being the 'sweeper' and staying back with the ladies who just wanted to walk. At the end, one thanked me. She said, 'I've never run this far before.' And we only did two-minute intervals and walked for four. It's just meeting people at their need and showing them that this isn't a big, scary sport."

Brenda Stallings signed on as the Little Rock chapter's "ambassador" and has been able to attract a core group of seven or eight women. (Only two showed up for the Saturday run before Mother's Day, and Stallings suspects hair care for Sunday's big day was the reason.) While she's fairly certain she'll never try a marathon–and so won't pass Central High on the Little Rock Marathon route–she's gone from someone who wasn't athletic and "got a C in gym" to someone who is aiming to do halfs in all 50 states (she nailed down Hawaii in September). Because of BGR!, she'll do them with other African-American women. "I will never run another race by myself again," she says.
What Might Be Done?

Increasing minority participation in distance running has multiple benefits. First, it is an effective and inexpensive way to address health problems of at-risk populations and provide people with a lifelong sport. And second, manufacturers, race organizers, and national institutions would increase sales, participation, and membership figures by tapping a new pool of runners. Of course, runners are by nature encouraging and inviting, but here are a few other things that might help.

1. Convene a summit on minority involvement for interested constituencies–shoe and clothing companies, national organizations like USA Track & Field, and race directors–to develop one recruitment effort. Mary Wittenberg of the New York Road Runners agrees "it would be great to rally behind one banner," but says, "let's keep getting stuff done, too: Real success will come in a grassroots way."

2. Race directors could promote events that support causes of interest to minority communities, such as diabetes prevention, and draw up courses that include minority neighborhoods.

3. Coaches should resist stereotyping and encourage more students of color to try cross-country and distance events. Michael D. Cauthen, M.S., a University of North Carolina–Greensboro lecturer and a former cross-country coach at Ohio State, has said, "Nobody tries to make black distance runners in the U.S. There is absolutely no reason we can't have as many great African-American distance runners as we have sprinters."

4. Individual runners might especially encourage coworkers and friends of color to try running with them or start programs through community groups targeted toward minorities. One poster on a runnersworld.com discussion board suggested, "Basing running clubs at the Y would be huge in terms of diversity."

5. The media, including Runner's World, could be more conscious of race when choosing models–for shoes, training exercises, midrace reaction shots–even, or especially, when the color of the runner is not germane to the story.

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